I met Rachel Rosenfelt on one of the first cold days of this year and it was chilly in her office, a small room crowded with three desks stacked high with books and papers in a converted warehouse space in Brooklyn. Rosenfelt, who kept her leather jacket on and sat on her feet to keep warm, is the editor and publisher of The New Inquiry, an eclectic and exceedingly intelligent online journal and monthly magazine of essays and criticism, much of which engages with radical feminist, Marxist and anarchist thought. I have been reading The New Inquiry for a few years and thought that maybe Rosenfelt could help me to understand something.

Every time I’ve come home to the US from my home abroad over the past four years, I notice a trend among people of my demographic: they have become increasingly politicised – and increasingly radical. The stereotype of the apathetic hipster has given way to a new kind of well-educated, middle-class twentysomething who rails against the prison-industrial complex, who talks about wages for housework, who throws around words like “imperialism” and “exploitation” with a growing sense of comfort. Occupy Wall Street may have something to do with it, but what is happening now in America feels more like a moment than a movement.

What is going on? “When I was first starting the New Inquiry and I had these ideas about this moment,” she told me. “Everyone said, ‘Rachel, write an essay about it!’ And I thought, ‘What if I just did it?’” She launched the magazine in 2009 with two friends, starting it on a Tumblr. Four years later it has only grown.

And Rosenfelt isn’t alone. Something is brewing in Brooklyn, something far more inspiring than another batch of artisanal organic ale. There is a revival of left-wing intellectual thinking on a level unseen since the 1960s. Young people are starting magazines and engaging in serious, substantial critique of the status quo. In addition to The New Inquiry there is Jacobin, “a magazine of culture and polemic” launched in late 2010 with an avowedly socialist perspective. Dissent, a socialist journal founded in 1953 has seen a revival, with a new crop of young staff. The hip literary magazine n+1 has also taken a decidedly political turn in recent years. And while many people launch publishing projects with earnest enthusiasm only to seem them fail quickly, this new crop of journals seems to have enjoyed unprecedented success. At the same time, a new cohort of journalists has emerged, young and enterprising reporters devoted to covering labour, poverty and inequality, and they see interest from the old guard of left-liberal magazines peaking.

“There are a lot of wonderful kids – people in there 20s and early 30s – who are really refreshing,” says Doug Henwood, a veteran leftist journalist and commentatorof a different generation. “There’s an intellectual seriousness without a narcotic earnestness. I find it very encouraging.”

It’s impossible to pin down a single explanation for this revival but a few things make sense: capitalism offering few opportunities to young people, a formal political structure that is paralysed and seems to ignore the concerns of most people, the internet providing new opportunities for intellectuals to find each other. Where it is going, what it means in terms of formal politics, the future of social movements in the US, or the overall intellectual climate are hard to predict.

One very likely effect, though, is a widening of the American political discourse. Earlier on the same day that I met Rosenfelt I sat at a posh pub in rapidly gentrifying neighborhood on the other side of Brooklyn with BhaskarSunkara, the editor-in-chief and publisher of Jacobin, a journal that claims to take the mantle of Marxist thought of Ralph Miliband and a similar vein of democratic socialism. “One of our main goals is to be an openly socialist voice, to be a left wing voice. That in and of itself widens the spectrum. In America you have a few steps to the right but not many steps to the left,” said Sunkara, a speed-talking 24-year-old socialist.

Articles on the website and in the quarterly print journal often delve into serious policy specifics on topics like transport workers’ strikes or the political economy of the Oslo Accords. Jacobin has received much attention in the mainstream and liberal media for a bunch of self-declared radicals. Jacobin authors have been cited by columnists in Bloomberg, on the reliably liberal, pro-Democratic Party TV network MSNBC, and elsewhere in the less-than-radical-spectrum. That’s because, Sunkara said, “We intentionally engage with liberals.”

It’s tempting to assume that this is all the province of a privileged cast of the educated, urban and young. That assumption may carry some truth. (For what it’s worth, Rosenfelt and Sunkara both went to elite private universities, as did most of the people I now hear talking socialism.) But there is evidence that something bigger is at play: A 2011 poll found that 49 per cent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 have a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” while 47 per cent have a negative reaction to the word “capitalism.” Among the population as a whole 50 per cent view capitalism positively and 60 per cent view socialism negatively. The sample, needless to say, are not all living in Brooklyn and working in the creative industries. Moreover, both Jacobin and The New Inquiry say that their readers come from all over the US (and other countries), suggesting that the enthusiasm for this is not limited to New York. And although Occupy (now three years ago) began in New York, it quickly spread across the country, if that is any indicator.

What accounts for this? An answer that sounds straight from Marx’s mouth might be the most obvious one: capitalism is in crisis. People in their late 20s and early 30s graduated university and entered the workforce in the worst economy since the Great Depression. GDP growth has stagnated since the financial crisis began in 2008 even under the “recovery”. Long-term prospects don’t look great, either, with some economists even suggesting that the era of growth might be ending in the US. Young people have been especially hard-hit by the downturn. Unemployment rates for people aged 18 to 29 are around 11.8 per cent compared to 7.3 per cent for the economy overall. And many economists warn that the prolonged unemployment will have lasting effects, permanently reducing incomes for thiscohort.Seventy percent of students in the US graduate with debt, and the averagedebt load is more than $35,000.

If that’s not enough to convince you of a turning tide, then consider that inequality in the United States has reached astounding levels. In the current recovery, 95 per cent of the gains have gone to 1 per cent of the people. It isn’t surprising that people are asking more systemic questions and attempting to imagine alternate futures, even futures that don’t include capitalism.

The current political situation in the United States doesn’t give cause for much optimism in the status quo. Even before the debacle of the government shutdown last month, American politics has been less than inspiring. The millennial generation voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in 2008. Young people led many of the campaign activities, hoping for a more equitable and more peaceful world, repudiating the war-mongering and free-market fundamentalism of George W. Bush. Obama ran on slogans of hope and change but the end result wasn’t quite the level of change many may have hoped for: Deportations of undocumented immigrants has skyrocketed, spying on citizens continues, inequality grows worse as the Democratic Party pushes an austerity-light agenda to counter the radical austerity of the Republicans.

Peter Beinart, a prominent liberal commentator, recently predicted that because of the harsh economic conditions and liberal social values of younger generations, this generationwill push American politics in a left-ward direction. Beinart points to the election of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a fierce advocate of the working class, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a man who once described himself as a democratic socialist, as evidence. If Warren emerges as a national figure in the Democratic Party, perhaps running against Hillary Clinton in next year’s primary, that would further Beinart’s thesis.

That may only be part of the story, though. “Liberals can’t get anywhere unless they’re the real reasonable alternative to some more threatening force,” said Henwood.That’s precisely what Sunkara is hoping for with the openly socialist platform at Jacobin. A resurgent socialist movement, even a small one that finds its strength in the realm of ideas rather than action of party politics, may be one step toward transforming the US political and intellectual landscape.

At the moment there is intellectual ferment but only vague flickering of action. And there remains tremendous ideological and intellectual diversity, even if the publishing and thinking world is the most visible manifestation of the current moment. But it was the anti-Stalinist left, much of it based in New York, much of it centered around magazines, that helped to lay the groundwork for the New Left of the 1960s. What happens next remains entirely unclear.

“We’re also trying to figure out the moment,” Rosenfelt said of The New Inquiry and its cohort. She was certainly not referring to elections. “And the limits of what we’re doing aren’t determined by the limits of our imagination.”

The Brexit Beartraps, #2: Could dropping out of the open skies agreement cancel your holiday?

So what is it this time, eh? Brexit is going to wipe out every banana planet on the entire planet? Brexit will get the Last Night of the Proms cancelled? Brexit will bring about World War Three?

To be honest, I think we’re pretty well covered already on that last score, but no, this week it’s nothing so terrifying. It’s just that Brexit might get your holiday cancelled.

What are you blithering about now?

Well, only if you want to holiday in Europe, I suppose. If you’re going to Blackpool you’ll be fine. Or Pakistan, according to some people...

You’re making this up.

I’m honestly not, though we can’t entirely rule out the possibility somebody is. Last month Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair boss who attracts headlines the way certain other things attract flies, warned that, “There is a real prospect... that there are going to be no flights between the UK and Europe for a period of weeks, months beyond March 2019... We will be cancelling people’s holidays for summer of 2019.”

He’s just trying to block Brexit, the bloody saboteur.

Well, yes, he’s been quite explicit about that, and says we should just ignore the referendum result. Honestly, he’s so Remainiac he makes me look like Dan Hannan.

But he’s not wrong that there are issues: please fasten your seatbelt, and brace yourself for some turbulence.

Not so long ago, aviation was a very national sort of a business: many of the big airports were owned by nation states, and the airline industry was dominated by the state-backed national flag carriers (British Airways, Air France and so on). Since governments set airline regulations too, that meant those airlines were given all sorts of competitive advantages in their own country, and pretty much everyone faced barriers to entry in others.

The EU changed all that. Since 1994, the European Single Aviation Market (ESAM) has allowed free movement of people and cargo; established common rules over safety, security, the environment and so on; and ensured fair competition between European airlines. It also means that an AOC – an Air Operator Certificate, the bit of paper an airline needs to fly – from any European country would be enough to operate in all of them.

Do we really need all these acronyms?

No, alas, we need more of them. There’s also ECAA, the European Common Aviation Area – that’s the area ESAM covers; basically, ESAM is the aviation bit of the single market, and ECAA the aviation bit of the European Economic Area, or EEA. Then there’s ESAA, the European Aviation Safety Agency, which regulates, well, you can probably guess what it regulates to be honest.

All this may sound a bit dry-

It is.

-it is a bit dry, yes. But it’s also the thing that made it much easier to travel around Europe. It made the European aviation industry much more competitive, which is where the whole cheap flights thing came from.

In a speech last December, Andrew Haines, the boss of Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority said that, since 2000, the number of destinations served from UK airports has doubled; since 1993, fares have dropped by a third. Which is brilliant.

Brexit, though, means we’re probably going to have to pull out of these arrangements.

Stop talking Britain down.

Don’t tell me, tell Brexit secretary David Davis. To monitor and enforce all these international agreements, you need an international court system. That’s the European Court of Justice, which ministers have repeatedly made clear that we’re leaving.

So: last March, when Davis was asked by a select committee whether the open skies system would persist, he replied: “One would presume that would not apply to us” – although he promised he’d fight for a successor, which is very reassuring.

We can always holiday elsewhere.

Perhaps you can – O’Leary also claimed (I’m still not making this up) that a senior Brexit minister had told him that lost European airline traffic could be made up for through a bilateral agreement with Pakistan. Which seems a bit optimistic to me, but what do I know.

Intercontinental flights are still likely to be more difficult, though. Since 2007, flights between Europe and the US have operated under a separate open skies agreement, and leaving the EU means we’re we’re about to fall out of that, too.

Surely we’ll just revert to whatever rules there were before.

Apparently not. Airlines for America – a trade body for... well, you can probably guess that, too – has pointed out that, if we do, there are no historic rules to fall back on: there’s no aviation equivalent of the WTO.

The claim that flights are going to just stop is definitely a worst case scenario: in practice, we can probably negotiate a bunch of new agreements. But we’re already negotiating a lot of other things, and we’re on a deadline, so we’re tight for time.

In fact, we’re really tight for time. Airlines for America has also argued that – because so many tickets are sold a year or more in advance – airlines really need a new deal in place by March 2018, if they’re to have faith they can keep flying. So it’s asking for aviation to be prioritised in negotiations.

The only problem is, we can’t negotiate anything else until the EU decides we’ve made enough progress on the divorce bill and the rights of EU nationals. And the clock’s ticking.

This is just remoaning. Brexit will set us free.

A little bit, maybe. CAA’s Haines has also said he believes “talk of significant retrenchment is very much over-stated, and Brexit offers potential opportunities in other areas”. Falling out of Europe means falling out of European ownership rules, so itcould bring foreign capital into the UK aviation industry (assuming anyone still wants to invest, of course). It would also mean more flexibility on “slot rules”, by which airports have to hand out landing times, and which are I gather a source of some contention at the moment.

But Haines also pointed out that the UK has been one of the most influential contributors to European aviation regulations: leaving the European system will mean we lose that influence. And let’s not forget that it was European law that gave passengers the right to redress when things go wrong: if you’ve ever had a refund after long delays, you’ve got the EU to thank.

So: the planes may not stop flying. But the UK will have less influence over the future of aviation; passengers might have fewer consumer rights; and while it’s not clear that Brexit will mean vastly fewer flights, it’s hard to see how it will mean more, so between that and the slide in sterling, prices are likely to rise, too.

It’s not that Brexit is inevitably going to mean disaster. It’s just that it’ll take a lot of effort for very little obvious reward. Which is becoming something of a theme.

Still, we’ll be free of those bureaucrats at the ECJ, won’t be?

This’ll be a great comfort when we’re all holidaying in Grimsby.

Jonn Elledge edits the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric, and writes for the NS about subjects including politics, history and Brexit. You can find him on Twitter or Facebook.